Richard Pryor’s Widow on Bill Cosby: “He’s a Piece of Shit”

Jennifer Lee Pryor, widow of legendary comedian Richard Pryor, has never been one to mince words. So it’s not surprising that she has plenty to say about the current scandals of her late husband’s comic contemporary Bill Cosby.

“Richard was dirty on the outside, but he was a good person on the inside,” she says on the latest episode of the Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend podcast. “Bill, he hated Richard because he ‘worked dirty’. Bill worked clean, so therefore, you know—Bill’s just a fucking hypocrite, and dirty on the inside…. It was a well-kept secret that Bill fucked everything that moved. [But] this kind of shit that we’re finding out about is beyond—I mean, I wasn’t aware of this kind of business.

“He’s done… he’s a piece of shit.”

When Pryor burst onto the comedy scene in the 1960s, he initially styled himself after Cosby, doing clean, family-oriented material; he didn’t find his own, frequently profane voice until the end of the decade. He would later co-star with Cosby in the Neil Simon comedy California Suite, and make a cameo appearance in the Cosby vehicle Uptown Saturday Night. Lee had previously classified their relationship as “a little awkward.”

Lee also tells Rosen that filming on the Lee Daniels-directed Pryor biopic will begin this July. Listen to the entire podcast here.